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Thursday, September 30, 2010

We take a break from our regular programming to bring you a community service message about something that is rather worrying to us lately.

As you might already know, there are 2 types of Nuffnang campaigns that bloggers may earn from: Metered Cost per Impression (mCPM) Campaigns, which pay according to the number of blog visitors who view the ads running on blogs; and Cost-Per-Click (CPC) campaigns, which pay bloggers based on the number of clicks generated on the ads.

We've noticed that certain groups have been engaging click fraud, which is defined as clicking on CPC advertisements intentionally just to generate earnings for a blog's owner. We understand that some of you may just be anxious about earning some side income from displaying the banner ads, but do note that this is in fact a violation of our Terms & Conditions under Section 6.

Among some of the actions which constitute click fraud are;
- clicking on other bloggers' ads and leaving a comment behind asking/hinting to the owner to click on their ads back
- asking for blog visitors' help to click on the ads
- registering a large number of blogs and clicking on ads on each of them
- repeatedly switching to a different IP to click on own ads

Banner ads spaces are bought by advertisers to promote their advertising campaign. Ads are are only supposed to be clicked on if the viewer is interested to find out more about the advertising campaign, not for the intention of earning extra money. Merely clicking on banner ads for the intention of earning extra money would jeopardize the effectiveness of a campaign. It may seem harmless, but click fraud benefits no one in the long run because should this situation worsen, the frequency of ad campaigns might be significantly reduced as advertisers will be selective to only advertise on blogs with no records of click fraud, reducing the number of ad space available to advertisers.

Our system is capable of tracking these actions mentioned above, which are documented and if necessary, be used as evidence for any legal purposes. In the past, Nuffnang has suspended and banned various individuals and groups for involved with this offence. However, as the number of bloggers who engage in click fraud has been growing in an alarming rate within our community, we are forced to be more vigilant to bring this to an end. We would take the necessary action to preserve the quality of blogs and ad space available to advertisers so other members of the community are not affected by those who engage in click fraud.

We realize that many Nuffnangers may not be aware that they might unintentionally be involved with click fraud, therefore we ask that you please help us spread the word. If you are aware of any of your friends or other Nuffnangers who have been engaging in such acts, we would appreciate it if you could kindly educate them on the harms of engaging in click fraud activities.
Thank you for your attention.